Many sides of Bob Dylan on display in CTC concert

“People are crazy and times are strange,” Bob Dylan sang by way of introduction on Thursday’s show opening Things Have Changed.

The tune may have been written some 17 years ago, but it seemed to capture the current state of affairs as well as the place the ever-prophetic Dylan now finds himself amid the turmoil.

“I used to care, but things have changed,” he concludes.

Yes, the time has come and long gone for the 76-year-old Dylan to pass the torch and, as it happens, fire up the torch songs.

It was another side of Bob Dylan (and another, and another) on display as his Never Ending Tour rolled through the Canadian Tire Centre for the first time in nine years, bringing with it a softer, gentler Dylan, following his latest venture — a trilogy of albums covering American Songbook material made famous by Frank Sinatra.

Any fan clamouring to see the vintage Dylan performing note-perfect versions of Like a Rolling Stone or Rainy Day Women probably would have been disappointed, but they shouldn’t have.

If one thing has remained constant since the beginning with Dylan, it’s his near obsession with reinvention: the ’60s protest folky, the plugged-in rocker, the Rolling Thunder masquerader, the ’80s Jokerman, the gravel-throated bluesman.

There were traces of each of those incarnations onstage Thursday, with Dylan and his crack band shifting effortlessly from the dark, rolling waves of the opener to the airy, breezy bounce of Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright, with Dylan seated at the piano, chiming out the lines he once fingerpicked on his battered acoustic guitar.

His voice was playful, almost cartoonish as he yelped out the chorus, punctuating each line with a three-note piano motif.

But his voice was positively snarling by Highway 61 Revisited, with his band digging in and sharpening the song’s already vicious edge.

That song, with its wild-eyed Biblical mythology and its deal with the devil, may have served as an odd transition to the music of Ol’ Blue Eyes, but somehow it just worked.

Stepping away from the piano, and looking all-class in a white dinner jacket with matching stripe up the seam of his black dress pants, Dylan casually strode over to the microphone and started crooning out a string of torch songs from his three-part tribute to Sinatra, with selections from 2015’s Shadows in the Night, 2016’s Fallen Angels, and this year’s Triplicate.

Why Try to Change Me Now? would have provided an adequate answer to any confused fan’s question, with its slack-key Hawaiian intro, and Dylan’s raspy wail shockingly well-suited to the tender tunes, like a latter-day Satchmo.

Long gone are the days when you used to show up at a Dylan concert not knowing whether you’d get “Good Bob” or “Bab Bob.”

Now it’s just Bob. He keeps them guessing, and he seems to be having some fun with the idea, too.

Summer Days, from 2001’s Love & Theft, was unabashed fun, with its fiddle intro giving way to a barrelhouse piano that saw Dylan doing his best Fats Domino impression.

There was the sugary balladeering of Make You Feel My Love or Stormy Weather striking a contrast with the rollicking rockabilly of Duquesne Whistle, or the brooding darkness of Pay in Blood, each drawn from 2012’s Tempest, his last all-original studio offering.

The casual fan got what they came for — or at least a version of it — when Dylan fired up an inspired arrangement of Tangled Up in Blue, as close as it got to a fan favourite, along with re-imaginings of his epic Desolation Row and his iconic Blowin’ in the Wind.

But casual fans were hard to spot at the Canadian Tire Centre Thursday. Dylan did not allow any media access, and attendance figures were unavailable at press time, but CTC staff were spotted with reams of tickets, ushering fans to unsold sections of the lower bowl. Staff then spent considerable time pursuing troublesome iPhone photographers in a strictly-enforced no-pictures policy.

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